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Singlelito — Non-Consciousness
(Bandcamp aMarxe no#, 2025, CD / DL)

by Peter Thelen, Published 2025-11-11

Non-Consciousness Cover art

Singlelito is Juan Pinto, a nineteen-year-old self-taught multi-instrumentalist and composer from Magangué, Colombia. Perhaps in the recent past there was a band — there are a couple live recordings as a quartet on his Bandcamp site that hail from 2024 — but all of the others going back to 2020 (including Non-Consciousness) were done by Pinto alone, playing all of the instruments and singing. He started learning to play guitar, bass, drums, and piano at age twelve (in 2018), and from there he began to learn how to record his own ideas; since that time he has acquired better equipment and methods. In the last five years he’s recorded five solo albums, plus two aforementioned live sets with the band, all available on his Bandcamp page. His original goal was to record only instrumental music, but the album at hand has lyrics all over it, mostly in English but some in Spanish, as he needed an outlet for his lyrics following several traumatic experiences, so what we have is an album of songs written and recorded over a one year period from January 2024 to February 2025, at his home in Megangué, his apartment in Barranquilla, and at Universidad del Norte in Barranquilla. Instrumentally, this is all really solid, lots of organ, electric piano, bass, guitar solos, and great drumming and percussion, with plenty of unconventional songwriting; the organ in particular sounds a lot like the one Mike Ratledge played on the first few Soft Machine albums, which at least in my mind gives the whole endeavor sort of a Canterbury flavor. Everything seems to be tightly composed and full of energy, and the vocals in general are excellent. “Cacophony in Zé Major” starts in Spanish but quickly moves to English — and all of the lyrics are in the download libretto, which one will probably need as it seems that the music was composed first and then the lyrics were sort of shoehorned in. His lyrics are thoughtful and heartfelt, with titles like “Leave, Left, Gone,” “And Sometimes... You're So Awful,” and the Zappa-like “And Every Time... You're So Hypocritical” — you know there’s some pent-up issues that Pinto needs to air out and release. “Picture of an Alleycat” features a Magma-like progression in its opening minutes, but then wanders all over the prog-rock map for the rest of its six minutes. Then there’s an amazing eleven minute bonus track at the end of the set: “A Lullaby for You, But You Didn't Sleep,” the title which drops another Canterbury hint, although this one doesn’t have printed lyrics, but then again, it’s mostly instrumental anyway, and it smokes.

Filed under: New releases, 2025 releases

Related artist(s): Singlelito

More info
http://amarxe.bandcamp.com/album/non-consciousness

 

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